Flickr™ is a popular photo sharing service that is accessible over the Internet. It employs various graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to display photos uploaded by users of its service. On the home page of a user, a collection of photos that have been recently uploaded by users of the service is displayed as thumbnail images. The service also provides its users with some flexibility to personalize their home pages. For example, users can custom define groups and a section on the home page displays the thumbnail images of the most recent photos that have been recently uploaded by the users in that group. A click on any thumbnail image hyperlinks the user to a web page that provides a larger image of the photo, additional information about the photo, and the text window for inputting any comments.
Another GUI of the Flickr™ service helps users to customize the display of their photo collections according to set time periods. FIG. 1 is a schematic illustration of such a GUI. The GUI includes a display section 110 for displaying thumbnail images, a chronology bar 120, left and right controls 130, 140 for the chronology bar, and a plurality of boxes 150 underneath the chronology bar. The chronology bar 120 is displayed with dates that range from the earliest date of the photo collection to the latest date of the photo collection. As a default, thumbnail images of all photos in the collection are displayed in the display section 110. The left and right controls 130, 140 may be moved left and right using a pointing device so as to contract the date range of the photos that are displayed in the display section 110. In response to the movement of the left and right controls 130, 140, the display section 110 is updated so that only the photos with dates within the modified date range are displayed therein. A click on any thumbnail image inside the display section 110 hyperlinks the user to a web page that provides a larger image of the photo, additional information about the photo, and text windows for editing the photo title, tags, and description. Each of the boxes 150 represents graphically the number of photos for the date range that is spanned by the width of the box. More photos are represented by taller boxes. Also, when the user moves the cursor of the pointing device over a box 150, the number of photos for the date range that is spanned by the width of that box becomes displayed inside the box.
The GUIs described above facilitate the process of sharing photos and organizing them into collections, but they do not, and fundamentally cannot, support the collaborative generation of life stories, which include text narratives of events in addition to photos representative of the events. Also, the GUIs that are employed in web-based life story collection systems generally are configured to facilitate user-to-system interactions and do not support the collaborative generation of life stories.